‘There’s nothing to thank me for,’ answered Mr. Van Torp.  ’I’ve often told you so.  But I have a good deal of reason to be grateful to you for all you’ve given me.’

‘Nonsense!’ returned the lady, and the sadness was gone again, but not all the tenderness.  ‘I must be going,’ she added a moment later, turning away from the fire.

‘I’ll take you to the Embassy in a hansom,’ said the millionaire, slipping on his overcoat.

’No.  You mustn’t do that—­we should be sure to meet some one at the door.  Are you going anywhere in particular?  I’ll drop you wherever you like, and then go on.  It will give us a few minutes more together.’

‘Goodness knows we don’t get too many!’

‘No, indeed!’

So the two went down the dismal stairs of the house in Hare Court together.

CHAPTER VI

The position of a successful lyric primadonna with regard to other artists and the rest of the world is altogether exceptional, and is not easy to explain.  Her value for purposes of advertisement apparently exceeds that of any other popular favourite, not to mention the majority of royal personages.  A respectable publisher has been known to bring out a book in which he did not believe, solely because a leading lyric soprano promised him to say in an interview that it was the book of the year.  Countless brands of cigars, cigarettes, wines and liquors, have been the fashion with the flash crowd that frequents public billiard-rooms and consumes unlimited tobacco and drink, merely because some famous ‘Juliet’ or ‘Marguerite’ has ‘consented’ to lend her name to the articles in question; and half the grog-shops on both sides of the Atlantic display to the admiring street the most alarming pink and white caricatures, or monstrously enlarged photographs, of the three or four celebrated lyric sopranos who happen to be before the public at any one time.  In the popular mind those artists represent something which they themselves do not always understand.  There is a legend about each; she is either an angel of purity and light, or a beautiful monster of iniquity; she has turned the heads of kings—­’kings’ in a vaguely royal plural—­completely round on their shoulders, or she has built out of her earnings a hospital for crippled children; the watery-sentimental eye of the flash crowd in its cups sees in her a Phryne, a Mrs. Fry, or a Saint Cecilia.  Goethe said that every man must be either the hammer or the anvil; the billiard-room public is sure that every primadonna is a siren or a martyred wife, or else a public benefactress, unless she is all three by turns, which is even more interesting.

In any case, the reporters are sure that every one wants to know just what she thinks about everything.  In the United States, for instance, her opinion on political matters is often asked, and is advertised with ‘scare-heads’ that would stop a funeral or arrest the attention of a man on his way to the gallows.